Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Mirror, mirror on the wall

Sydney Jaffe, left, and Peyton Meadors, right, play a card game with others students at Oak Mountain Intermediate school on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2014, in Indian Springs, Ala.
Butch Dill—The Associated Press

My friend Poor Elijah spends a lot of time yelling at his car radio. Last week he yelled at a report about self-esteem. Some researchers have concluded that “when self-esteem is artificially boosted, it reduces performance and effort.” They discovered this by performing an “experiment.” Volunteers who imagined “elevating” themselves in an elevator, plane, or balloon “experienced a small boost in self-esteem,” but when asked to solve test problems or choose a cellphone plan, they did worse than volunteers who imagined descending back to Earth. From this the researchers concluded that “artificial” self-esteem is bad, an opinion Poor Elijah has held for thirty years without imagining going either up or down.

My friend was upset for several reasons. First, he couldn’t imagine any actual scientist calling that an experiment. Second, it’s exactly the kind of experiment education experts mean when they talk about “research.” Third, all it takes is common sense to recognize that excessively inflating my opinion of myself, especially without a valid reason, can’t be good for me. It’s why American students tend to excel internationally in math self-esteem, even though their actual math “competence” is mediocre.

I never had a self‑esteem problem. They hadn’t been invented in 1964. People said instead that I had an inferiority complex. I always wondered how someone as arrogant as I was could possibly have an inferiority complex, but the current wisdom held that acting superior was only a cover for feeling inferior. In fact, acting better than everybody else was the best proof, aside from acting worse than everybody else, that you had a complex.

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Of course, I did really feel inferior in certain respects. Specifically, I felt ignored by girls and poor at athletics, but I felt this way only because I was ignored by girls and poor at athletics. Time has taught me it’s part of the human condition to sometimes feel not good about yourself.

Sometimes there’s even a good reason.

When I felt bad about myself for cheating our classmate Bennett at poker, I was supposed to feel bad. That’s what made me give the money back. When I wasn’t named an editor on the school newspaper because I was too obnoxious, I had another lesson to learn. And when I went one for ten from the foul line, that was just something I had to live with.

Nobody excused my cheating on the grounds that I needed attention. Nobody petitioned the faculty that I be named an editor on the grounds that I was obnoxious because I didn’t have a girlfriend yet. Nobody demanded that I be excused from foul shots, allowed to stand closer, or given more shots than everybody else.

I don’t mean that parents never made excuses for their children. But when inferiority complexes collided with reality, reality usually won.

Why are we so hypervigilant about guarding students against an honest look at the limits of their ability and the flaws in their behavior?

Self‑esteemers often have good intentions. They rightly argue that sometimes children don’t succeed because they think they can’t, and that we should therefore raise some students’ expectations. Advocates also contend that some students who fall into drug use don’t feel good about themselves. That’s why schools spend so much time and money on programs to convince students they’re okay the way they are.

Unfortunately, orchestrated self‑awareness and canned sensitivity sessions can’t make much of a difference to children with delinquent parents. Or even to late blooming boys who wish that girls would notice them.

Building trust and self-confidence isn’t a game.

Also it begins at home.

I’m looking at a checklist of ten self‑esteem commandments from a middle school workshop. The first commandment sets the tone: “Criticism never changes a thing. Refuse to criticize yourself. Accept yourself exactly as you are.”

I can’t understand that kind of thinking. Criticism changes many things. A person who refuses to criticize himself, who accepts himself exactly as he is, will never change for the better, at least deliberately. Change often comes when you’re dissatisfied with yourself, and anyone who sees himself as never at fault, never worthy of criticism, who wilts at the slightest hint of condemnation, condemns himself to the evil that comes with complacency. Sometimes when I feel bad about myself, it’s because I ought to.

Self‑esteem isn’t a new word. It has to do with determining values. The Webster’s on my desk says it entered the language in 1657. The entry also includes a pair of synonyms, self‑respect and self‑conceit. I’m all for self‑respect, as long as I don’t have a reason to be ashamed of myself. Self‑respect in the absence of good cause is self‑conceit. That’s the meaning of self‑esteem we’re working with these days.

Children should learn to esteem themselves, but their esteem should reflect who they are. Who they are isn’t where they come from, or how someone else has degraded them. It’s how they act and what they do with what they’ve been given.

Children who make an honest effort and behave themselves should esteem themselves hardworking and well‑behaved.

Children who don’t should esteem themselves differently.

This doesn’t mean that they can’t change.

But how likely are they to feel the need if it’s policy to tell them that they’re fine the way they are?

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

About the Author

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.